If the premise of White Eared's It's Just a Dream…Right? sounds like a thinly veiled excuse for the main characters to have sex, that's probably a feeling you should go with. While many a work of either romance or erotic fiction has operated on an even thinner pretext, this one certainly doesn't bury its purpose very deep. There is some semblance of a plot beyond that, and even a few hints of a burgeoning romance alongside the physical relationship, but on the whole, this is a book you pick up when you're just looking for some mindless BL smut. And honestly? There are worse reasons for a book to exist.

The story follows Jungoh and his reluctant employer, Ibeom. Jungoh is taking a break from college (no word on whether this is related to his mandatory military service, but that does seem possible given his age), and he's looking for work. When he sees a flier advertising a post that sounds too good to be true, he decides to look into it. The job is at a shrine, and the shaman associated with it specializes in neutralizing “vicious nightmares.” As he explains it, a regular nightmare is awful in the moment but ultimately can't cause harm and typically fades away once you wake up. But an evil spirit causes a vicious nightmare, and those can and do hurt people both physically and emotionally. Ibeom's job is to exorcize these spirits by entering into a client's dream and burning the nightmare seeds from within. Jungoh, as his assistant, is meant to accompany him, watch over the process, and make sure he gets home safely.

Canny readers will already have guessed that this does not go according to plan. At his trial job, Jungoh somehow ends up inside the client's dream as well, much to Ibeom's horror. (His older brother, who is also present, is perhaps even more aghast.) Despite the unforeseen situation, Jungoh, who has worked in an office before where Ibeom has not, can help him isolate the nightmare seed, but there's an unintended consequence: because Jungoh has interrupted Ibeom's workflow, Ibeom is afflicted with a soul-sickness called a “malady.” These take on different forms depending on who contracts them, and in Ibeom's case, it makes him really, really horny. You can presumably guess what Jungoh's job quickly becomes.

With this line once crossed, the story begins to settle into what, for Ibeom, is a very awkward situation. He can't masturbate the horny away, so he needs Jungoh's help. Jungoh isn't opposed to giving it, but he's not sure what that means for the two of them. Jungoh is perfectly willing to date Ibeom, and there's a real sense that he'd actually like that quite a bit. Despite Ibeom's caustic attitude, Jungoh enjoys being around him, and once he got over the issue of being in someone else's dream, he ably rose to the occasion and liked being able to help dispel the evil spirit. But Ibeom isn't comfortable with any of this. The implication is that he was perfectly fine being all by himself in a familiar routine. Jungoh, from the moment he walked into the shrine, threw the carefully organized papers of his life into the air, sowing disorder in Ibeom's previously orderly life. It's incredibly unsettling to the shaman, and even worse is the fact that his new sexual appetite seems directly tied to the assistant he desperately wishes he could fire. Ibeom is suddenly dependent on Jungoh, and that's not okay with him.

Although most of the volume is focused on the men's sexual relationship – or at least feels that way, page count notwithstanding – the story still has fun with the idea of nightmares and dreams. The first nightmare the men enter is set in a corporate office, where all the men are wearing suits. Upon his entry into the dream, Jungoh is fully dressed on top but isn't wearing pants, which Ibeom casually remarks is pretty common; it's a nice reference to what is apparently a universal nightmare. (Jungoh also almost immediately gets an erection, furthering the joke.) Later, when Ibeom instructs Jungoh to make up a dream for them to meet in, Jungoh opts to be a Joseon king, but because his only reference is period K-dramas, his imagination is lacking, leading to some unintended side effects that terrify him in what, for the readers, is an amusing way.

This volume doesn't go much beyond the basic setup, which isn't particularly satisfying. There are hints that Ibeom's grandmother is setting him and Jungoh up for reasons of her own, but that's sort of a one-and-done moment towards the beginning of the book, and the main drive of this volume is establishing the dynamic that the rest of the series will, presumably, operate on. The art isn't great (although it is uncensored), but it does get the job done; it mostly just feels unpolished. It's Just a Dream…Right? probably wouldn't be my first BL manhwa recommendation, but it's good for a little light escapism, and that's a niche that needs filling as much as any.